Drop Footage Time Zero opens a palette to toggle this text only preference on the fly.
In other words this script will modify your prefs to allow you to drop any footage in the timeline at time 0 (instead of wherever the playhead is). You can toggle it on or off by using the radio button. You don't need to reboot AE for this to work (as it would be the case if you changed your text prefs manually).

It can also be edited to work as a startup script by taking the three lines from the onClick function